I've been enjoying all of the cyborg readings, even if I'm still not sure I'm getting all of it. (Our class discussion did help some, though.)

Reading about cyborgs instantly makes me think of my current favorite TV show, Battlestar Galactica, which is based around a war between humanity and the Cylons, their robot creations (which include models that are nearly undetectable from real humans). The idea of humanity, what separates biological humans from their unnatural counterparts, is a big theme of the show.

I found this list of movies and TV shows that feature cyborgs . . . there are quite a few! What's with Hollywood's interest in these man-machines?? Also, as someone mentioned their greatest fear of cyborgs in class as being their potential destructive capacities, I noticed a ton of these films and shows have very militant cyborgs. Interesting.

Harraway's piece once again put something I have very little familiarity with and didn't think was really at all relevant to discussing new media into a totally new perspective. Just as with Marxist though, I didn't really understand how it could be related until we got to issues of copyright and sharing information with hypertext. Honestly, I felt very lost very many times in the piece. Harraway is writing with an intimate knowledge of many thinkers of whom I am ignorant. That said, I will comment on a few ideas. With the dawn of a conscious fabrication of parts of our biological nature, older ideas that dictate gender constructs seem to become less important. I thought that Harraway saw in this new phenomenon a deliverance from what she saw to be 'dominating' and damaging concepts of gender that were based on superiority. Honestly it's difficult for me to get any further in than that without confusing myself.

Well, after taking a couple of days off, I returned to the internet to find some startling news. We have been talking some about artificial intelligence this semester, but we have no been talking about man-machine interaction/combination, also know as cyborg technology. This is a video of the Dean of Drexel's new mechanical arm. It offers more function / mobility then I have seen from prosthesis, which is not much but this still looks like a good sign. And I also found this article on new technology. The invisibility cloak is jaw dropping, and the machine that increases strength is my other example of cyborg technology.